Because I don't have enough blogs. But seriously, this blog will be for some other things I do that are not necessarily related to individual movies.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Garden of Hedon On Amazon Prime

After going back and forth with Amazon for a while I got the captions file approved, and hit Publish after correcting all the information associated with the flick. Amazon said it would show up in their system within a couple of weeks.

Two days.

It appeared late last night as published, so I went ahead and looked, and yep, there it is.

Now, I don't anticipate a ton of money from Amazon on this. Like I mentioned, we get paid only fifteen cents per hour streamed, so basically about $.29 every time someone watches the whole movie. I'm not sure how fast-forwarding works, but I'm guessing they don't credit you for that.

But, I have an online-friend who put his movie up and has kept us abreast of his totals. Week one he'd made around $50. Not even enough to pay for the captions required to put it up on Amazon Prime.

Then some crazy shit happened. After a couple of weeks he hit half a MILLION minutes viewed. That's around $1200.

Sure, it's not quit-your-job money, but it's pretty good, especially for under a month. And the thing is, the more your movie gets streamed, the higher up the search results you are, which leads to MORE streaming.

The biggest hurdle is people finding your movie, because--at my current count--there are 884 horror movies on Amazon Prime. When my flick went live it was 861 out of 884.

It doesn't seem to be updating much but I'll check tomorrow since we started spreading the news today.

Thing is, though, this could be a game changer. Let's say you can make $7K-$12K a year streaming it through Amazon. You could conceivably bypass a distributor who's only going to give you--if you're lucky--a $10K advance on a back-end you'll never see.

You could actually host your worldwide premiere on Amazon Prime. When you submit the Publish thing you can set a date a few weeks in the future so it's not published right away. Then you pimp the hell out of the premiere date, make an event of it, and get a lot of people streaming it.

I imagine if it's the first place you could see the movie then you might be able to get some heat there.

My immediate worries are that Amazon will decide this is too expensive a venture for them. They're going to be paying out a lot of money that they weren't paying out before, all in the quest to compete with Netflix. They're going to have to worry about fraud--people involved in the movie streaming it over and over again just to make a few extra bucks.

What would be pretty great is if Netflix decided to try it themselves. Man, would distributors be shitting themselves if we filmmakers could do a complete end-around on them.

On the bad end, Amazon needs to fix their goddamn Xbox app. First off, their search engine won't show more than 1000 titles in the search. So when you start scrolling across the roughly 8000 movies they have online, it will stop at 1000 and go no further.

Also if you want to search for a title you click Y for search. Then it says "Click here to search". Bitch, I already clicked Y to search, why am I clicking another button?

Trying to binge watch a series is tougher than Netflix. When an episode's over you have to manually go to the next episode to play it. And if you finish a season, you have to go add the next season to your watchlist since they keep their seasons separate.

They've had enough time to steal the Netflix model, so let's get on that, huh?